Yearly Archives: 2013
Bob Goodwin: Software Engineering in Crisis – Healthcare.gov is Just the Dead Canary
It has been a good generation to be involved with software. The scarcity of the skillset combined with the demand for the output have generated outsized incomes, while the work has been consistently rewarding. Our quirky group of builders has had an outsized influence on our industries, not to mention our culture and ideals. But that influence is looking less benign as the rigid procedures of computing are changing commercial relationships and the application of the law.
Read more...Ilargi: QE, The People And The Damage Done
A report issued by McKinsey Global Institute last week on the real world impact of QE warrants more scrutiny than it has gotten so far.
Read more...“What Then Must We Do?” Gar Alperovitz at The New Economy Summit
By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Here’s something to listen to with your morning coffee; it’s a lecture on co-operatives, with Q&A following, by Gar Alperowitz at the New Economy Summit in Boone, NC, in April of this year. I like the title, because the agency in “What Then Must We Do” is explicit, in contrast (intentional or not) to [Anglophone usage of] Lenin’s famous “What Is To Be Done” (sez who?) where lack of agency signals the Bolshevik’s intent to tell people what was to be done. We know how that movie ended; there were a lot of movies that ended that way in the 20th Century. The video:
Read more...Everything I was Afraid to Ask about Bitcoin but Did
Lambert here: Since Bitcoin is in the news lately, and the last post occasioned some lively discussion…
The econ-blogosphere has been Bitcoin crazy for a while now. I haven’t quite understood what all the fuss is about, and knowing the personalities involved in much of the hype, I was afraid to ask too many detailed questions.
But I did anyway.
Read more...Links 11/20/12
Wolf Richter: Use Bitcoin As A Currency, Get Wiped Out (The Government Likes It That Way)
Four years after its creation, folks are still arguing over what bitcoin is: “investment opportunity of the millennium,” “part of a societal revolution,” a security, a currency, a casino token? Whatever. But US regulators now have strategy of killing it as a currency
Read more...Jackie Calmes’ “Dirty Secret” About the Opponents of Austerity is That They are Correct
When we pull away the camouflage that New York Times reporter Calmes deploys to obscure matters, the “dirty secret” that emerges is that key members of both parties realize that the purported “Grand Bargain” actually represents a self-destructive Grand Betrayal that should be opposed.
Read more...Michael Olenick: Obamacare Pits the 50% Against the 49%
Buried on CNN’s website is a story about an early Obamacare success…
Read more...CNI (UK) and its Lawyers Complain to Blogs, But Appear to Shy Away From the Daily Mail
CNI (UK)’s confusing attitude to its connections with Carbon Neutral Investments, service provider to carbon scams
Read more...Links 11/19/13
Another Lurking Obamacare Problem: Balance Billing
One of the proofs that Obamacare is really about helping insurers and Big Pharma rather than ordinary Americans is its failure to do much about the seamy practice known as balance billing.
Read more...Managing Bureaucrats
Yves here. I have to confess that the big reason I’m partial to this article is it is consistent with my experience. Metricization of business, and worse, employee performance, has become a fetish.
Read more...Welfare Queen Walmart Has Thanksgiving Food Drive for its Own Needy Employees
Prima facie evidence of the need to boycott Walmart (as if more were necessary)
Read more...Greenwald, Rosen, Scahill and the Price of One’s Journalistic Soul
Yves here. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in hoping for the best from the new journalistic venture funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, among others, have joined with much fanfare. But the fact that one wishes them well should not blind observers to the possible large flies in the ointment.
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